Taught with Professor Jill H. Casid

This seminar provides a framework for thinking about the theory and practice of visuality in British Romantic culture (1780-1850). The readings and visual presentations will consider a wide trans-disciplinary range of objects, activities, and spectacles across the domains of Romanticism: travel, spectacle, high art and other modes/media, scientific illustration, exploration and colonization as well as questions about vision and visuality asked during this period about the role of perception and the physics of color; the politics and ethics of the gaze, the differences and commonalities of bodies; the personality of mechanisms and automata, the use of optical instruments and theatrical displays; the role of visuality in the discourses of empire and travel; and the interplay between the norms and practices of high art and those of popular print culture.

The work of this seminar emphasizes collective and individual work on digital practices and the description of digitized images of the Romantic era, its persons and its objects. Participants will build galleries of digitized images and develop descriptive information to accompany them when the results are folded into an on-line gallery of Romantic visual culture to be housed at Romantic Circles.